Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Tank
Ifound Rhidian in the armoury before dawn.
He was bent over a table covered in maps, his hair tied back with a strip of leather, fingers tracing the mountain passes between the Spring and Winter Courts.
No crown. No magic. No Summer fire burning beneath his skin.
Just a man with sharp eyes and a tactical mind, doing the only thing left that he could do.
“You’re up early,” I said.
He didn’t look up. “Haven’t slept.”
I understood that. The bear hadn’t let me rest either.
Every time I closed my eyes, it paced the edges of my consciousness, restless in a way that had nothing to do with the usual threats.
This was something deeper. A wrongness in the earth itself, like a storm building so far beneath the surface that you could only feel it in your bones.
I pulled a chair to the opposite side of the table and sat down.
The wood creaked under my weight. Everything creaked under my weight these days.
The Spring Court magic had been doing something to me since we’d arrived, thickening the connection between my body and the land until I wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began.
When I pressed my palm flat to the ground, I could feel the root systems of the trees.
The slow crawl of water through soil. The heartbeat of the court itself, steady and ancient.
It should have been comforting. Instead it made me anxious. Because if the land was speaking to me, it was also telling me something I didn’t want to hear.
“Walk me through it,” I said, nodding at the maps.
Rhidian straightened. He looked tired, but there was a clarity to him that hadn’t been there in the first weeks after his resurrection.
The fog of displacement had burned off, replaced by something harder.
Purpose, maybe. The kind that comes when you’ve already died once and decided that the second time around, you were going to savor every second.
“The Winter Court sits in the mountain basin here.” He tapped the map. “Natural fortress. The passes funnel any approaching force into kill zones. Arik’s had centuries to fortify the approaches. Even with our numbers, a frontal assault would bleed us dry before we reached the gates.”
“What about the tunnels we used during the rescue?”
“Collapsed. Alyssa brought the ceiling down when we escaped. Even if they weren’t, Arik would have sealed every entrance after the breach.” He paused, his jaw tightening at some memory he didn’t share. “He doesn’t make the same mistake twice.”
I studied the map in silence. The Spring Court spread across the lowlands to the east, fertile and green even in this season.
The forest where we’d nearly lost Dean stretched along the eastern border.
To the north, the terrain climbed toward the Winter Court mountains, growing steeper and more hostile with every mile.
“The western approach,” I said. “Through the Autumn territories.”
Rhidian nodded slowly. “Longer march. Harder supply lines. But the terrain opens up before the final ascent. We could bring the full force to bear instead of feeding soldiers into a bottleneck.”
“How long?”
“Eleven days, assuming we move around the Wildling Forest and at the pace of the infantry.”
Eleven days. I turned that number over in my mind, weighing it against what I knew about our supplies, our fighters, the fragile morale that held our camp together like rope around cracked wood.
We had enough food for ten days if we rationed.
Enough healers for maybe half the casualties a direct assault would produce.
Enough courage to fill a handful of people and a lot of fear distributed among the rest.
“Show me,” I said.
We worked through the details for the better part of an hour.
Rhidian was good at this. Better than good.
His mind moved through tactical problems the way Maddox moved through emotional ones, with an instinct that went beyond training.
He’d been a prince and then a renegade leader before he was a corpse, and the years of courtly politics and military planning hadn’t left him just because his crown had.
By the time the camp began to stir around us, we had something approaching a plan.
March west for the Autumn territory. Approach Winter from the broader western face.
Deploy the freed Endless who were battle-ready as the forward line, with the guardians and Nymerian creatures as flanking support.
The five courts’ magic, channelled through Alyssa, would be the hammer. The army would be the anvil.
On paper, it was clean. Almost elegant.
The bear growled low in my chest, and I pressed my hand flat against the table until my knuckles went white.
Because on paper meant nothing.
The court had transformed in the weeks since our return from the Fifth Court.
I walked the perimeter that morning the way I did every morning, checking the defences, counting heads, reading the temperature of the people we’d gathered.
It had become habit. You learned things from being among people rather than watching from the outside.
You learned who was sleeping and who was pretending.
Who was sharpening weapons because they needed to and who was doing it because their hands wouldn’t stop shaking unless they had something to hold.
The freed Endless were the hardest to read.
They’d been settling in since we brought them out of the Winter Court, but settling was a generous word for what most of them were doing.
The ones who’d retained enough of themselves to function had integrated into the daily work of the camp.
Cooking, building, repairing. Small tasks that gave their hands purpose while their minds slowly remembered what it felt like to choose.
Others hadn’t been so lucky. I passed a cluster of tents on the eastern edge where the worst cases were kept.
Men and women who stared at nothing. Who flinched at loud sounds.
Who couldn’t hold a coherent conversation because whatever Arik had done to their minds had left cracks too deep to see.
Our healers did what they could. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
And then there were the ones who’d come through intact enough to be angry.
Ezra was one of those. I spotted him near the training yard, running a group of former Endless through combat drills with the kind of focused intensity that looked productive from a distance but felt like a powder keg up close.
He was good. Quick, precise, technically sound.
He was also furious in a way that hadn’t dimmed since the day we’d freed him, and fury like that needed direction or it consumed whatever it touched.
I watched the drill for a few minutes. Ezra barked corrections, adjusted stances, pushed his people harder than was strictly necessary.
Some of them responded well. Others had the glazed look of people going through the motions because someone was telling them to, which was uncomfortably close to what Arik had done to them in the first place.
“He’s useful,” a voice said beside me.
I looked down. Fizzle sat on a fence post at my elbow, small and compact and insufferable. His golden eyes tracked the drill with the assessing gaze of someone who’d watched warriors train for centuries.
“He’s angry,” I said.
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“They are when anger is the only thing keeping someone upright.”
Fizzle made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been dismissal. With him, it was impossible to tell. “He lost seven years. His sister died while he was Endless. He never got to bury her.” A pause. “Anger is a reasonable response.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I’d been angry for less. The difference was that I’d had decades to learn what the bear felt like when it was fed by rage instead of purpose, and I’d learned the hard way that the two didn’t produce the same results.
“When we march,” I said, “I want him commanding the freed Endless who are fighting.”
Fizzle’s head turned sharply. “You want to give an angry man an army.”
“I want to give a man who understands exactly what was taken from those people the responsibility of leading them. He won’t spend their lives carelessly. Not when he knows what they cost.”
The owl griffin stared at me for a long moment. Then he ruffled his feathers and looked away. “Occasionally, you say something that isn’t entirely foolish.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head. It’s already large enough.”
I left him on his fence post and continued my circuit.
The rest of the morning was logistics. I checked the supply stores with Linnea, a Summer Court Fae who’d taken charge of provisions.
We had enough for the march if we were careful but not enough for a prolonged siege.
That meant we needed to hit hard and fast once we reached the Winter Court.
No drawn-out campaign. No war of attrition. Get in, fight, finish it.
I checked the weapon stores. The armourers had been working through the night, turning out blades and arrowheads and reinforcing shields with whatever metal the Spring Court’s forges could produce.
The quality was mixed but the quantity was at least sufficient.
Not everyone would have a sword, but everyone who could fight would have something sharp to hold.
I checked the healers. Overworked, under-supplied, running on determination and not much else.
They needed rest they wouldn’t get and herbs that didn’t grow in this region.
I made a note to speak to Alyssa about whether the Spring Court magic could accelerate the growth of medicinal plants.
It seemed like the kind of thing the land might do for its queen, if asked properly.